Three poems by CHRISTOPHER DEWEESE

The River

It is a bad, bad business to walk to the riverexpecting something casually spiritualto cast aside your skin.Rocks tongue the bloody light where I’ve been going,a cheap motel on the other sidewhere the complimentary bibles have expiration datesand the Danishes reflect my face in their glacial frosting.We become magnificent as they crumple, bending in the fluorescenceour ancestors left usto better see our cruel bodies.Outside, the evening quickensinto a crooked lineof poorly-built fires,as if the whole county were neck-deep in the so-called mysteryof what anglers doafter taking off their waders.The mosquito-bit air darkens into night,scuttling the distanceinto many canoes between us.Like a green villager,I have confused the river for my friend.I threw starfish into the wrong water,mistaking what was potable for a stronger tide.I might as well pardon my own history for bringing me here.I’m sorry, darling, but where we’ve been is just no match for standing on this bankflexing our musclesuntil the sun jumps up like a fishand the angry wind whips against the leaves,the whole tableau uncertainly taking noteof where the river goesand what it meansas, beside it, a dozen drunk survivalists unzip their camouflage to show us where they areand what they have been hiding.

14 The Paris-American

The Cloud

The cloud is trying to hold itself together, and I am trying to hold up the cloud. Heavy and tired, I look around.I drag myself across the rainbow,a quiet exhibit immediately forgotten in the question of distance, how many miles it is between here and anything,the sky a cliff all jump and floating, the miles just numbers hid between my breathingand the real light stumbling like transparent fists through my window.I want to grab the cloud and juice it down,cut it into smaller pieces then stuff it in a blender.The cloud is boneless. It’s getting closer, vibrating like a uvula in the handsome wind.I breathe evenly. For a gangster, I’m getting pretty good at this.It’s like breathing is a bank I’ve robbed so oftenI’ve been named its president.The responsibility soothes me.Orphans depend on my decisions.I look out the window.I walk into the white building.

15 The Paris-American

The Island

Islands breathe themselves through the wateras if they are plants and the waves a season,as if all they need is plenty of lavato control their industry.Like careful ingredients in a long imagined tragedy,they invent their own excess,raise their children to bob and batter against the dented shorelines.I know the petrified trees,the agony of seconds when the wind changes,leaving only teeth to remember your lips by.I brought this to the orchestrabecause I hoped to sing lead,but first I had to find a sort of atmospheric sorrowburied in the rushes,left hanging on the hanging lines.I hoped to keep my own societyin the company of those menwho refuse to be evacuatedbecause they believe in a fate so completeit needs them to stay and feed the animals others leave behind,hushed in the sudden wild of terrible statuary a disaster soon becomes.Along with the sky, all my life I have been arrivingtoo late, empty handed as the waves that wash away, stashing their own ghosts in the sound foam makes,one hundred tiny mouths opening yet speechlessand then those terrible, quiet echoes.

16 The Paris-American

Christopher DeWeese is the author of The Black Forest (Octopus Books, 2012). His poems have appeared in Boston Review, jubilat, and Tin House. He teaches at Smith College.